Josh was looking at Carrie in horror as she delivered this pronouncement of him, while the children were staring at their father as though considering her opinion.
“Papa used to laugh,” Tem said seriously. “But since Mother—”
“That’s enough,” Josh said sharply, cutting his son off.
“Stay,” Dallas said, begging. “Please stay. It’s so nice when you’re here.”
As Carrie held the child, she had to blink back her own tears. Perhaps it was the children she had come to love from the photo, for they were just as she’d hoped they’d be. She knew that if she’d come to love them this much in two days, it would be unbearable if she stayed a whole week and then had to leave them. “I think it’s better that I leave now,” Carrie said softly.
“We will vote,” Tem said, but looking at his father for permission.
Josh took a moment, but he nodded his consent. Carrie was sure that the vote was going to be a tie, two for her leaving, two for her staying, but when Tem asked who was for Carrie staying as long as she could, both children put up their hands, then, slowly, so did Josh.
Carrie looked at him. “I want my children to be happy,” Josh said softly in explanation, “even if it is only for a matter of days.”
Carrie sighed, for she felt that she was making a mistake. She already loved these children, and she was going to love them more in the next few days. She didn’t know how she was going to be able to leave them in just a few days’ time.
“Sometimes the stage is late,” Tem said, hope in his voice.
Smiling, Carrie reached across the table and took his hand in hers. Yes, she thought, who knew what could happen in a week? “All right,” she said at last. “I will stay for as long as I can.”
Chapter Seven
“How do people fall in love?” Dallas asked her brother.
It was early morning in the loft, and since Carrie had arrived, Josh had tried each night to fit himself into Dallas’s narrow bed, but he complained that Dallas wiggled too much. This morning he had risen early and gone down to chop wood for the new stove so Carrie could cook breakfast. Dallas had heard her father mumble that the idea of Carrie cooking was a joke, but she hadn’t heard her father laughing.
“I don’t know,” Tem said, but he’d given the idea some thought. “I think the man gives the woman flowers and they hold hands, then they get married. I don’t know what else.”
“Could we ask someone? Aunt Alice maybe.”
“I don’t think Uncle Hiram knows about love,” Tem said, and Dallas nodded in agreement. One couldn’t very well put love and Uncle Hiram in the same thought.
Silently, Tem got out of bed, put his dirty work clothes back on, then helped Dallas into her plain, worn brown dress before they went down the ladder together.
Both of the children stood out of the way as Carrie and their father went about preparing breakfast. Tem knew that Dallas was much too young to understand what was going on, besides, she was too busy spending her time running her fingers over the roses on the wall to pay attention to much else, but Tem was all too aware of everything that went on between his father and Carrie.
Carrie and his father sniped and spat at each other like a dog and cat. Josh said that Carrie couldn’t cook, that for all that she could buy a stove with her father’s money, she didn’t know what to do with it. Then Carrie said that if Josh had any decency, he’d teach her how to cook.
Tem nearly groaned at that, for as far as he could tell, his father was the worst cook on the face of the earth. Before Carrie came, if it hadn’t been for the women in town and Aunt Alice taking pity on the children, who kept growing
thinner by the day, they might have starved. Their father once set eggs on to boil, then went out to feed the horses. When he came back, he discovered that he’d cracked the eggs when dropping them into the pot and the insides of the egg had come out. They’d had white goo for breakfast.
Now Carrie was asking Josh to give her cooking lessons. Tem expected his father to tell the truth, that he knew as much about cooking as Carrie did, but Josh didn’t tell the truth. Instead, he told Carrie that he didn’t ask her how to farm and she shouldn’t ask him how to do her job. Josh said that according to the letter she sent she knew all there was to know about cooking. In fact, Josh was thinking about bringing home a live goat and Carrie was to slaughter it and do all the rest to it. Tem knew that his father had no idea what else was done to a goat to make it ready to be put on the table, but it didn’t sound that way. It sounded as though his father knew all there was to know about goats and everything else on the farm. Carrie got very angry and told Josh he was an idiot and she would be glad to see the last of him. Josh said that he was also thinking about buying rabbits so his wife could cook them, too.
In the end they had oatmeal and bacon and eggs for breakfast. The oatmeal was only half-cooked, some of it still dry flakes. The bacon was half-burned, half-raw, and the eggs were cooked so solid in the center that Tem knew he could have used the yolks for ice hockey pucks.
Both the children sat at the table, dabbing at their food, while Josh told Carrie in detail everything that was wrong with the meal. He said that the children couldn’t even eat it. At that Tem kicked Dallas, and the two of them started eating as though they were dying of hunger and the food was delicious. When Dallas started to complain that her oatmeal tasted bad, Tem put three tablespoons of sugar on top of it and that stopped her complaints.
After breakfast—the longest meal of Tem’s life—Josh put on his hat and said that the children had to get ready to go with him to the fields. Dallas made a long face and said that she wanted to stay with Carrie, that Carrie was going to leave and she wanted to see her. Tem could see that this hurt his father, so Tem said loudly that he wanted to stay with his father, that he was looking forward to hoeing turnips and pulling bugs off the corn.
With an angry look, Josh said that Tem was to stay with Carrie too. Tem protested, but Josh said that he didn’t want or need his son with him, then he slammed out of the house.
“What a jolly, cheerful fellow,” Carrie said. “What a joy he is to have around.”
Dallas said, “When Mother—”
Tem kicked her so she’d shut her mouth. Their father had talked a great deal about not telling anyone anything about the past, but it was sometimes hard for a baby like Dallas to remember. Tem knew that his father hadn’t always been as he was now, that there had been a time when their father had been very happy. Tem remembered when he used to run to his father’s outstretched arms, and he remembered his father laughing and taking his children to fairs and the circus and to see plays. He remembered the way his father used to talk to their mother. In fact, Tem remembered the way his father had seemed to talk to all women. Their mother used to say that Josh was a real ladies’ man, that he charmed them all—but Tem didn’t think Carrie found their father “charming.”